Stand up for the facts!

Our only agenda is to publish the truth so you can be an informed participant in democracy.
We need your help.

More Info

I would like to contribute

Ciara O'Rourke
By Ciara O'Rourke March 5, 2021

Photos show UK Lords-a-sleeping, not US senators

If Your Time is short

  • Images of members of the House of Lords in the United Kingdom were wrongly described as showing sleeping U.S. senators.
 
See the sources for this fact-check

A proposal from Democratic lawmakers to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour has been met by Republican resistance, but also some online misinformation.  

A  screenshot of a tweet that has been shared widely shows three photos of what looks like people sleeping through a legislative session. 

"If $15/hr is too much for minimum wage, then $85/hr is too much to pay our senators to literally do nothing," the post says.

This post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.)

Featured Fact-check

U.S. senators earn an annual salary of $174,000, or about $84 per hour based on a 40-hour work week. But the images in the tweet show members of the House of Lords, the upper house of Parliament in the United Kingdom — not American lawmakers.  

Sign up for PolitiFact texts

The images in the post can be found online with the context that they were taken in the Lords Chamber.

The original tweet describing these people as U.S. senators has been deleted. The account posted that it had mistakenly used images of the House of Lords.

We rate this post False. 

 

Read About Our Process

The Principles of the Truth-O-Meter

Our Sources

Browse the Truth-O-Meter

More by Ciara O'Rourke

Photos show UK Lords-a-sleeping, not US senators

Load more

Support independent fact-checking.
Become a member!

In a world of wild talk and fake news, help us stand up for the facts.

Sign me up